I remember the first time I encountered spam after posting on Craigslist. I was a sophomore in college and had used Craigslist to advertise my tennis lessons in Bethesda (which is near Washington DC). I remember an email from a father who lived abroad and wanted to send me a decent amount of money for lessons for his son, who apparently lived in Bethesda. He provided many details regarding the child’s transportation, schedules, and prices. At first my gut felt wrong about this, however I immediately responded to the email very excited about the opportunity. After a few email exchanges, I got the feeling this sounded too good to be true and it started to sound fishy. The so-called “father” started asking me for a lot of personal and confidential information via email and refused to call me to discuss the lessons over the phone. Also, I noticed a lot of typos and lack of English in subsequent emails. I checked the internet and family/friends to find out what they thought and they all said red flags had been raised. I then googled this email and found that other Craigslist and classified users were experiencing this same email. Lucky for me I stopped all contact and never lost money or got scammed… but it was close! After this experience, I thought it would be helpful to highlight some ways to avoid these scams or what to look for. I highly recommend checking out these bullet points, it just might save your wallet!
- always follow your gut and what makes you feel inside. If the email immediately sounds strange, too good to be true, and/or raises a red flag, take precautions!
- Use a search engine like Google, and look for the actual potential scam email. You will be surprised that sometimes people or users of classified ads warn others about the scam.
- just don’t answer, that is not worth it. There are plenty of legitimate buyers out there, so work with them.
- Take a look at listings that have many typos, missing contact information, no images, and unusually low or high listing prices. Posts that use all or many of these should raise red flags.
- Avoid contacting Repeating listings on classified ad sites. These may not be a scam, but they may be spam. I noticed this on many larger classified ad listing sites. Many contain tons of spam and have no way to really control it. Frustrating for people looking for quality listings/products that actually meet their search criteria! Also, this can be frustrating for people who list products, but then don’t get visibility due to a lot of spam.
- Try them over the phone. If you’re worried about a scammer, see if you can talk to a real person before moving on to anything else.
- Deal with people locally! Take a look at the product/service you see listed and in person is a much better idea than doing it all over email. By doing this in person, you can verify the quality of the product and it allows for a more reliable transaction.
- Beware of listings that require online false transactions, transfers or cashier’s checks.
- Beware of listings or emails that require financial information, social security, credit card information, bank accounts, personal information and/or credit card checks.
Hope these tips help! If you ever want to report scams to the authorities, you can do so by reporting them to IC3 or the FTC online.